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Sunday, 27 November 2016

RIP Fidel Castro 1926-2016

I
can’t find the quote but this was the perfect time for Fidel to
depart from the scene – as his nemisis, American imperiaiism is in
terminal decay. Fidel Castro can rest in peace.

Fidel
Castro represented a continuity with a world that formed me.

That
has gone now as the world is seeing the danger from nuclear bombs and
the spectre of near-term extinction of the human species as a result
of abrupt climate change (two of the main things he warned the world
of in recent times).

I
chose the following among the many appreciations of Fidel Castro
largely for its headline.

Fidel
Castro's death removes from the global scene a political genius and
colossus who transformed Cuba whilst securing its independence from
the US, and who played a key role in bringing about the fall of South
Africa's apartheid regime.

The
death of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has provoked the
usual praise of him from some and condemnation of him from others.

What
no one denies is the colossal impact he has had, not just on his own
country but on the world.

This
fact bears repeating because it is so remarkable. Cuba –
the country which Fidel Castro led – is small (its current
population is 11 million) and relatively poor. It has no
great wealth of natural resources, and no great industries. At
the time Fidel Castro came to power its social services were
primitive, its school and health systems hugely unbalanced and
undeveloped, and much of its population was illiterate.

By
no conceivable stretch of the imagination is Cuba a Great Power, and
before Fidel Castro became its leader it occurred to no one to think
of it as one.

That
the leader of such a small country was able to have such an
extraordinary impact on the world stage is little short of
astonishing, and says a huge amount about Fidel Castro’s
personality as incidentally it does about Cuba and about the
revolution he led.

Suffice
to say that by comparison the nations led by Mao Zedong, Ho Chih
Minh, Ruhollah Khomenei and Nelson Mandela – the four other great
revolutionary leaders of the post Second World War world – China,
Vietnam, Iran and South Africa – are by comparison with Cuba all
giants (in China’s case a titan) and it is not therefore surprising
if their revolutionary leaders were therefore able to command world
attention.

It
is true but it is also trite to say that one reason why Fidel Castro
and Cuba attracted so much attention was because in the 1960s they
became the focus of the Cold War, with the USA and USSR almost going
to war over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis on 1962.

It
is trite because Cuba only became so important in the Cold War
because Fidel Castro made it so.

There
have been many other left wing and revolutionary leaders in the
Caribbean and Latin America before and after Fidel Castro. None
of them – not even Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – have ever come
close to matching Fidel Castro’s political stature, or managed to
make their countries the centre of superpower conflict in the same
way.

The
reason Fidel Castro succeeded in doing this was because he was
prepared to do things in the Caribbean and Latin America – the US’s
backyard – that no other Caribbean or Latin American leader has
been prepared to do. Unlike them he carried out in the 1960s a
genuine revolutionary transformation of Cuban society, something that
no other Caribbean or Latin American leader has ever done.

What
that means in practice is that there is no institutional continuity
between pre-Castro Cuba and the Cuba today.

The
army, police, state bureaucracy, media and judiciary, are completely
different, the wealth – including the lands and factories – of
the old Cuban oligarchy, has been subjected to a comprehensive
revolutionary expropriation, and the economy, health and education
systems have been entirely taken over and recreated in Fidel Castro’s
own image.

To
say that this was controversial would be a gigantic
understatement. In fact it remains the main charge and
grievance against Fidel Castro of the people he displaced to this
day, and explains the relentless quality of their hostility to him.

It
is also the reason for the US embargo.

The
revolutionary changes Fidel Castro carried out in Cuba in the 1960s
made it impossible for his government and revolution to be reversed
internally – the fate of every single other Caribbean and Latin
American revolution before and since – because it deprived the US
of the usual tools it uses to reverse such revolutions.

The
US – which never tolerates anything that remotely resembles
revolutionary change in its Caribbean and Latin American backyard for
very long – has been struggling to come up with a response ever
since.

The
embargo it imposed on Cuba was one such attempt at a
response. Though it long ago visibly failed, the
US’shabitual
obstinacy and petulance and
the powerful vested interests which support the embargo mean that it
has continued ever since.

To
say that it was the revolutionary transformation of Cuban society
that Fidel Castro carried out in the 1960s that accounts for his
survival and success however begs the question of how it was done?

Part
of the answer undoubtedly lies within Fidel Castro’s
personality. It is clear that he possessed to the highest
degree the clarity of vision, the determination and the unsentimental
ruthlessness that no revolutionary leader can succeed without.

It
is however important to say that Fidel Castro was able to do it
because of the support of Cuban society. The reason for
that is in part because of a peculiar feature of the Cuban
revolution, which is bound up with Cuba’s unusual relationship to
the US.

“The
breakdown in relations between the United States and Cuba was the
consequence of the Castro Revolution of 1959. This was a revolution
launched from the countryside against a corrupt oligarchic elite
based in Havana.

That
elite in turn had extremely close connections with the United States.
These extended back decades to Cuba’s liberation war against Spain
in the 1890s. The United States intervened in that war in a manner
that achieved for it a dominant position in Cuba right up to the
point of Castro’s revolution in 1959. It would not be an
exaggeration to say that throughout this period Cuba was essentially
a protectorate of the United States.

It
should be clarified that this was a relationship that differed
significantly from the one the United States has with nearly all
other Latin American countries. The United States has been the
dominant political influence — in effect the not so silent partner
— in the political system of every Latin American state for most of
the last century. However in no other Latin American state or
country, save Panama and Puerto Rico, has US political engagement
been so direct and open as it was in Cuba.

This
form of US domination had important practical significance. Not only
did the United States acquire a major military base at Guantánamo
Bay (which it retains still) but it achieved total domination of
Cuba’s economy and political system in a way that made both in
effect appendages of the economy and political system of the United
States.

As
is well-known Cuba gradually evolved into an important playground for
the American rich and not so rich. From the 1920s to the 1950s Havana
became a US holiday and gambling centre to rival Miami and later Las
Vegas. Moreover, many wealthy Americans had second homes there. These
included the writer Ernest Hemingway and the wealthy Dupont family
whose former villa Xanadu was one of the inspirations for the palace
of that name in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. It remains a
landmark in the holiday resort of Varadero to this day.

This
was the period when the Tropicana nightclub in Havana achieved its
heyday, when the Capitolio building in Havana was built in direct
imitation of the Capitol in Washington, when the US Hershey chocolate
company built an electric railway to service its sugar plantations
and when Havana became a byword for tropical hedonism and vice.

This
US political and economic control went together with considerable
corruption. Its status as a protectorate was incompatible with
democracy and at no time before the Castro Revolution in 1959 was
Cuba in any true sense one. At the time of the Revolution Cuba was
actually a dictatorship led by a former staff Sergeant Fulgencio
Batista.

Behind
the facade of a dictatorship the true power in Cuba actually rested,
as it had always done, in an oligarchy of wealthy families (some
tracing their origins back to the period of Spanish rule), the
military, the US embassy and US businessmen, several of whom were
well known gangsters.

The
two key figures amongst the latter were the mobsters Meyer Lansky and
Santos Trafficante, with the former often regarded as the true ruler
of Cuba during this period.

The
immediate pre-revolution period in Cuba was one of chronic
impoverishment and neglect of the Cuban countryside combined with a
frenetic construction boom in Havana itself.

This
period when the Tropicana nightclub in Havana achieved its heyday and
when Havana became a byword for tropical hedonism and prostitution
was also a period of growing inequality and of social unrest.

In
fairness it was also a time of considerable cultural achievement, of
the emergence in Havana of a substantial middle class and of the
construction of a highway system of a sort unknown at this time in
other Latin American states.

These
intense connections between Cuba and the United States explain much
about the subsequent period of protracted hostility.

For
the Cubans many of their societal problems became explicable by
reference to their subordinate position to the United States, which
to a proud people was humiliating and exploitative. The
Castro Revolution was in a sense Cuba’s declaration of independence
from the United States.”

(Bold
Italics dded)

In
the same article I discussed the various US attempts to overthrow
Fidel Castro and how – precisely because the Cuban revolution was
effectively Cuba’s declaration of independence from the US – they
actually consolidated support for Fidel Castro and his revolutionary
government

“The
consequence has been five decades of struggle by the United States to
bring Cuba back under its control. This has involved an economic
blockade and unrelenting attempts to destabilise and overthrow the
Cuban government.

On
occasion this had had its farcical aspects such as the plot to murder
Fidel Castro with an exploding seashell or the recent attempt to
recruit Cuban hip-hop artists in a plot to overthrow the government.
This should not however detract from the enormous material and
psychological damage done to Cuba.

The
US economic and political war against Cuba has been further extended
by the powerful vested interests in its perpetuation.

Anti-Castro
groups managed to achieve political control of the Cuban community in
the United States in the 1960s and the perpetuation of the US’s
undeclared war against Cuba served both to cement their control of
that community and their political influence within the United
States. Allied to various political and economic groups in
the United States that were also opposed to reconciliation for
ideological, economic or political reasons, they formed a powerful
political lobby resisting any rapprochement between the two
countries.

However,
the conflict between Cuba and the United States also serves as a case
of an irresistible force meeting an immovable obstacle.

Precisely
because the Cuban revolution was in a sense Cuba’s declaration of
independence from the United States, US political pressure upon Cuba
in the end served to consolidate support for the Cuban government
rather than undermine it.“

(bold
italics dded)

It
is of course also true – as I also discussed in this article –
that Fidel Castro and Cuba could not have won through without the
critical support in the 1960s and 1970s of the USSR.

However
saying this, though true, is also trite, because the reason the USSR
was willing to commit itself to Cuba in the way it did – and which
it never did to any other Caribbean or Latin American revolution –
was precisely becauseof the comprehensive revolutionary
change that Fidel Castro carried out in Cuba, which showed to the
USSR that Cuba’s revolution would be lasting and was for real.

Fidel
Castro’s genius was that he was not only able to secure this Soviet
support to carry out revolutionary change within Cuba, but that he
was also able to leverage the USSR’s support to carry out
revolutionary change in southern Africa.

The
importance of Cuba’s involvement in the wars against the apartheid
regime in Angola and Namibia has always been recognised by the
leadership of the ANC (including by Nelson Mandela himself), though
in the West it has gone completely unacknowledged, and is disputed by
some people in South Africa itself.

My
opinion, having personally discussed this issue with eyewitnesses of
the fighting in Angola and with people involved in the anti-apartheid
struggle, is that its importance cannot be overestimated, and that
the Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 was crucial – as Fidel
Castro, Nelson Mandela and many others have always said it was – in
acting as the catalyst for the end of the apartheid regime.

To
be clear that regime would sooner or later have fallen anyway. Fidel
Castro’s and Cuba’s intervention were however decisive in causing
it to fall when it did. Given that the apartheid regime’s
further perpetuation into the 1990s would have been a total disaster
for the people of southern Africa, that is something that they –
and the rest of the world – have huge cause to be grateful to Fidel
Castro for.

As
Fidel Castro on numerous occasions admitted, Cuba’s intervention in
the wars in southern Africa could not have happened without the
support of the USSR. It was Fidel Castro’s brilliant
skill in obtaining that support, and the outstanding use he made of
it, which was however decisive. Since the USSR was a
superpower, it was Fidel Castro’s skill in leveraging its support
which for a time made Cuba a Great Power.

In
recognising the colossal scale of Fidel Castro’s achievement, it is
however also necessary to admit that his revolution has run its
course, and that it did so some time ago.

Though
the revolution has transformed Cuba – especially its formerly
impoverished countryside – and has provided Cuba with what are by
any standard exceptional health and education systems, the degree of
political and social control Fidel Castro was forced to impose on
Cuban society in order to safeguard his revolution has by all
accounts been causing increasing frustration within Cuba itself, as
an immeasurably better educated, healthier and far more
self-confident generation of younger Cubans increasingly feels –
whether rightly or wrongly – that the existing system does not give
full scope to them to develop their abilities.

Despite
perennial Western criticisms of Cuba’s human rights record, Fidel
Castro never carried out the sort of Terror in Cuba that
has been such a feature of other revolutions carried out elsewhere,
and in a region where political
repression continues to be common,
and where life
is still cheap,
life in Cuba under Fidel Castro has been immeasurably safer and more
secure for the vast majority of Cuba’s people than it has been in
any of Cuba’s neighbours.

Nonetheless
the great challenge for Cuba today is to move forward, despite likely
continued US hostility, in order to make Cuba a freer and less
controlled society – one better adapted to the present needs of its
people – whilst preserving its independence, and the massive social
gains of Fidel Castro’s revolution.

That
is something that Cuba almost certainly can achieve but which – as
Fidel Castro always knew – given Cuba’s vulnerability
and limited resources, it can only achieve with external help.